STL Arts Ecosystem: A Topography
Visitor Assembly is a design studio based in St. Louis and founded by Alyssa Knowling and Marcus Stabenow. As in many cities in the Midwest, the arts ecosystem in St. Louis shifted dramatically due to the pandemic. The St. Louis arts community does not have a deep archive that documents its people, places, and resources. Most of that memory resides with the individuals who shape the arts, and when they move on, that knowledge goes with them. The map designed by Visitor Assembly outlines the spaces and resources that form the St. Louis arts ecosystem.
The map is divided into the type of space: gallery, museum, resources which don’t have a physical site, outdoor spaces, and temporal art convenings which occur regularly. The first drafts of this map were geographic, with each site tied to an address. However, Visitor Assembly decided that this kind of mapping did not attend to the many resources that do not have a physical site such as Midwest Artist Project Services (MAPS), an organization that offers free or low-cost resources for working artists in all disciplines, collectives, and emerging arts organizations in the St. Louis region.
Nor did it map projects that are not spatial, but temporary, such as PSA: STL, a public art project organized by Shannon Levin and Marina Peng featuring rotating text installations by St. Louis-based artists, writers, and poets. The topography of this map not only gives a snapshot of the St. Louis arts in 2022 but places them in relation to one another by service and type. The distribution of color and area is determined by the number of each type. The list, of course, is not comprehensive. There are many spaces important to St. Louis arts that are not on this map, and to include them all would be a near impossible feat. Rather, the editorial decision of which spaces to map relies on the choice by Knowling and Stabenow on which are important to them. This map is as much as a comprehensive overview as it is a personal archive of the people and spaces that comprise Knowling and Stabenow’s community.
